Kamin: Jeanne Gang's Wanda Tower design needs work

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel last week pronounced the proposed Wanda Vista tower by architect Jeanne Gang “a great building,” he didn’t just misjudge a promising but problematic preliminary design for what would be one of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers — he gave away the store.

The planned 88-story, $900 million hotel, condominium and retail tower, which is backed by China-based Wanda Group and still requires city approval, is the biggest and most ambitious thing going in a high-rise building boom that’s mostly been a snooze.

No bland glass box here. On a showcase site along the Chicago River, Gang envisions three interconnected high-rises of progressively increasing height that would flaunt a provocative mix of convex and concave walls.

Like the John Hancock and Aon centers, which were once known as Big John and Big Stan (the latter for the Standard Oil Company of Indiana), Big Wanda will be a major skyline presence, visible from every direction. She — er, it — will especially stand out when seen from the south, culminating the view from northbound Lake Shore Drive as drivers pass through Grant Park.

The planned tower raises major urban design issues, most notably the need for an attractive way for pedestrians to get from the Chicago Riverwalk to the park at the heart of the 28-acre Lakeshore East enclave, where the tower would be built. Failing to require the developer to build that connection would be a major missed opportunity.

So the stakes, both for the symbolic realm of the skyline and our everyday experience at ground level, are enormously high. Which is why the mayor should have demanded more from this East-meets-Midwest endeavor instead of prematurely embracing it.

Unveiled during U.S.-China trade talks here, the plan provided Emanuel a convenient photo op — and a chance to lay out his economic development bona fides as his re-election campaign gears up.

His assessment, though, may have been based as much on Gang’s resume as her design. She’s won acclaim for her Aqua Tower, whose balconies flow across its facade like waves, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

But even geniuses have off days or require constructive criticism to do their best work.

The job presents Gang and her colleagues at Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects with a grand opportunity and a vexing challenge: how to erect an economically viable high-rise above a narrow road that runs through the center of the property. You can’t dig the pit for an elevator shaft there. You have to dig around it.

Gang's solution, characteristically bold, clusters three interconnected towers -- roughly 44, 66 and 88 stories tall -- along East Wacker. The middle tower would straddle the narrow road. According to people who’ve seen the plans, elevators would be placed in the shortest and tallest high-rises, leaving lots of room in the center tower and creating a higher ratio of usable floor space than in a conventional design.

Ground was broken Sept. 7, 2016, for the 98-story Vista Tower, a condominium and hotel skyscraper designed by Jeanne Gang that will rise along the Chicago River at 363 E. Wacker Drive. It will be Chicago's third-tallest building.

The building is expected to top out at around 1,150 feet, some 500 feet taller than the city’s master plan for Lakeshore East now allows. Because the Wanda Group and its local partner, the Chicago-based Magellan Development Group, need the city’s OK for that change, city officials have leverage to require improvements to the public realm in exchange for the added height. But will they?

At least the broad urban design outlines of Gang’s plan design are sound. Her tower would step upward from the east, facing the horizontal expanse of Lake Michigan, to the west, toward the soaring verticality of the Loop. Its lower half would fill a gap in the wall-like row of buildings along East Wacker. The tower would also enliven that wall, which mostly consists of bland architectural straight-men.

Still, the city’s release of just four renderings, including two interior views and exterior views from the north and west, leaves key questions unanswered: How will the building look from the east and south? What sort of connection will it make between the Lakeshore East park and the Riverwalk? Why not something like Helmut Jahn’s passageway joining the two pavilions of the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare? Its curving, backlit walls and neon ceiling sculpture make getting there half the fun.

The overall view of the tower is so poorly rendered that skyscraper wonks are speculating that the developers farmed out the drawing to a Chinese “rendering farm” instead of letting Gang do it. It’s impossible to know — Gang declined to comment. But the design, a mix of glass and metal with stacks of recessed balconies climbing the exterior walls, is a very mixed bag.

On the plus side, it promises to combine the Willis Tower’s bold, stepping silhouette with Trump Tower’s alluring, light-reflecting surfaces. There’s an appealing, beaconlike quality to the big glass cube that would protrude from the tower’s base and house a lounge and restaurants. It suggests that Gang wants the design to be alluring on the street as well as the skyline.

But as rendered, the tower looks leaden and crudely detailed, as though giant boxes had been piled atop one another, then squashed from above. There’s none of the lyrical fluidity of Aqua’s balconies. A tower this big and prominent must rise to a higher aesthetic level, as Trump’s eventually did after a woeful preliminary design.

Still, there’s hope: One rendering of the project, visible online but not released by the city, shows a compelling close-up view: Three, crisply detailed towers with gracefully curving surfaces instead of stolid, folded planes. They suggest three sisters of different ages, standing side by side. The interior views are also enticing, promising big spaces, tilting columns and striking views of the river and nearby park.

With her penchant for investigation and architectural invention, Gang often seems like a latter-day Eero Saarinen, the architect of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, who seemed to develop a new paradigm for every project. But there’s a risk that this approach will lead to fashionable novelty, not enduring quality. As Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said: “We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.”